Everyday, Not Rare

Blue and white was never the special-occasion china. It was the everyday kind, which is exactly why it's lasted.

Every house that comes through here has some of it somewhere — a cache pot holding a plant nobody remembers buying, a plate that got hung on a wall instead of eaten off, a pitcher for milk that ended up holding cut flowers more often than not. Delft, Imari, transferware, a good hand-painted koi vase: different countries, different centuries, same instinct. Put something blue and white on the table and the room settles.

It keeps showing up in what leaves here, too — quietly, more than almost anything else we sell. So this time we pulled all of it into one place: fourteen pieces, most of them fifteen to two hundred dollars, none of them precious about it.

Two of Pat McCarthy's paintings already live in this world without our help — a rabbit standing in a red chinoiserie beaker, a cat curled inside a Delft plate. They're on this page too, at the end, in the company they were always going to keep.